Completing the Circle

By Anne Stevenson

Anne Stevenson's Completing the Circle is a swansong collection of moving elegies and celebrations written in her 80s during the early decades of what she calls in her preface, 'a newly transformed, already terrifying century'. Most of these poems look back on her past from 'the viewpoint of a bewildered survivor facing up to the realities of time passing and beloved contemporaries dying'. In common with much of her work – and fittingly for this wide-ranging book of remembrance – she manages to maintain a tone that is serious without being funereal, acquiescent without indulging in confessional despair, keeping personal self-pity at bay with a characteristic detachment that can quietly slip into wit. The title-poem, while it owes a debt to Rilke, essentially expresses the poet's own long-considered belief that 'death naturally and rightly completes the cycle we recognise and accept as life'. Completing the Circle is Anne Stevenson's 16th collection, her third since her much praised Bloodaxe retrospective Poems 1955-2005. It follows two other late collections, Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Feb 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781780374994

Anne Stevenson

Anne Stevenson was born in England in 1933 of American parents, and grew up in the US. After several transatlantic switches, she settled in Britain in 1964, and has since lived in Cam-bridge, Scotland, Oxford, the Welsh Borders and latterly in North Wales and Durham. Her many awards have included the $200,000 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry and the Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago. As well as her many collections of poetry, she has published a biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), a book of essays, Between the Iceberg and the Ship (1998) and two critical studies of Elizabeth Bishop’s work, most recently Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe, 2006). Her latest poetry books are Poems 1955-2005 (2005), Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012), all from Bloodaxe.

Book preview

1

ANNE STEVENSON

COMPLETING THE CIRCLE

Anne Stevenson’s Completing the Circle is a swansong collection of moving elegies and celebrations written in her 80s during the early decades of what she calls in her preface, ‘a newly transformed, already terrifying century’. Most of these poems look back on her past from ‘the viewpoint of a bewildered survivor facing up to the realities of time passing and beloved contemporaries dying’.

In common with much of her work – and fittingly for this wide-ranging book of remembrance – she manages to maintain a tone that is serious without being funereal, acquiescent without indulging in confessional despair, keeping personal self-pity at bay with a characteristic detachment that can quietly slip into wit. The title-poem, while owing a debt to Rilke, essentially expresses the poet’s own long-considered belief that ‘death naturally and rightly completes the cycle we recognise and accept as life’.

‘While Anne Stevenson is most certainly, and rightly, regarded as one of the major poets of our period, it has never been by virtue of this or that much anthologised poem, but by the work or mind as a whole. It is not so much a matter of the odd lightning-struck tree as of an entire landscape, and that landscape is always humane, intelligent and sane, composed of both natural and rational elements, and amply furnished with patches of wit and fury, which only serve to bring out the humanity.’ – George Szirtes, London Magazine

Cover etching: Several Circles (1926) by Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim

Museum, New York, USA / Bridgeman Images

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ANNE STEVENSON

Completing the Circle

5

Per Carla Buranello e Sandro Montesi

Lido di Venezia,

con affetto e grazie infinite

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

PREFACE

Saying the World

I

Anaesthesia

Poppy Day

Sandi Russell Sings

Defeating the Gloom Monster

A Dream of Guilt

Improvisation

Completing the Circle

Ann Arbor Days, 1947–1950

The Day

Choose to be a Rainbow

II

How Poems Arrive

Dover Beach Reconsidered

The Bully Thrush

Winter Idyll from My Back Window

Goodbye, and Cheers!

Shared

Voice Over

Candles

A Compensation of Sorts

Of Poetry and Wine

After Wittgenstein

Now We Are 80

Verses from a Waiting Room

An Old Poet’s View from the Departure Platform

III

As the Past Passes

The Gift Bowl

Pronunciation (1954-55)

Mississippi (1960s)

At 85

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Copyright

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Preface

My title for this collection was originally Elegies and Celebrations – unexciting but accurate, for it describes it exactly. Its range of forms and styles is, for me, even more than usually mixed. You will find here among a frequency of sonnets, lyrics, meditations and narratives, a number of light or occasional verses, which may suggest that the book has little purpose other than to please my ear and satisfy my urge to record my experience and remember my friends. The truth is more complicated.

Writing poems in my eighties during the early decades of a newly transformed, already terrifying century, I look back on my disappearing past from the viewpoint of a bewildered survivor. From the first sonnet, ‘Anaesthesia’, to the last one, ‘At 85’, these poems cannot help facing up to the realities of time passing and beloved contemporaries dying. The title poem was written over ten years ago after the too-early death of a talented writer who was a close friend of my sister-in-law. It was rewritten